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I guess @fortelabs has beef with me? With all due respect to Tiago, I'd like to share why I think this view is misguided.
Human brains are much worse than computers for storing information in many ways: storage space, access speed, fidelity, transmission, etc. So it's seductive to argue that we ought to simply put all of our knowledge on servers somewhere and forget about having it in our heads.
The problem is that knowledge needs to be in your head to fully participate in reasoning, pattern recognition, creativity, problem solving and basically anything that requires intelligence. No knowledge in your head makes you a rock, not unencumbered.
This sounds abstract, so let me give a clear example. Let's say you're trying to solve a programming problem and you need to look up regular expression syntax. No problem, just Google regex and in a few seconds you can get the syntax you need.
However, this protocol is of no use if you have no idea what regex expressions are, how they might work or how they might solve the problem at hand. In other words, you may be able to avoid memorizing syntax, but if you don't hold the *idea* of regex in your head, it's useless.
If you look at experts in any domain, the thing that separates them is having enormous libraries of stored patterns. This is the dominant "chunking" model, which argues that without in-head knowledge, you can't even *see* what question to ask.
Classic studies of this involved chess masters/novices. Without enough pattern knowledge, all you see is the pieces. A master sees pins, forks, tactics and higher and higher abstractions.
Expertise merely illustrates the problem, it isn't the only situation where this applies. We're all experts in our native language. If you don't know a single word you can look it up. If you don't know any words, you can't do anything. It has to be in your head.
I think the misguided view Tiago is promoting is because of a false dichotomy between "remembering" and "reasoning" or something else. This may itself be a false analogy from computers where CPUs and "logic" is separate from RAM and storage.
I'm deeply suspicious that anything so cleanly separable can be said for human brains. To reason well you need to have a lot of patterns stored in your mind. Just because you *could* Google them doesn't mean they'll help at all when it comes time to actually reason about things.
To make my point clear, regardless of the system one uses, information has become 100-1000x more accessible than 100 years ago. But people definitely aren't 100-1000x smarter. Thus there's something wrong with the idea that external access to knowledge is all that matters.
Since I don't want to be overly dismissive, I think there are a lot of cases where memorization can be excessive, especially when knowledge is acquired in a way that's unlikely to participate in the kind of reasoning described above.
Side note: Not all people agree with the chunking model, even though it is dominant (such as deliberate practice researcher Anders Ericsson). But nobody I've spoken with seems to think that acquired patterns aren't part of the story behind how we reason about things.
Second, I think having a good "second brain" as @fortelabs likes to call it is a good complement to having a good first brain, and there's perhaps a lot of memory/reasoning best offloaded to that. But a war against having knowledge in mind is definitely a foolish one.
Also, since I'm not an academic, here's Harvard-educated cognitive scientist @DTWillingham arguing about the value of in-head knowledge for reasoning and learning: aft.org/periodical/ame…
